Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, r. Aug. 2026

Page 8 Cricket thought he might go outside and fill the can from the hose, but it was January, no more than ten degrees outside, the sky frozen and white, the trees terrified and bare.

Page 10 “You are contained,” Silas said. “You can visit with your mother, or spend time with me. Or you can go into the world outside and look at its endlessness. And always you have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper. Right?”

Page 15 Cricket looked at her and thought he recognized her. A grade above was another world. He saw those kids as he saw adults, teachers, cops. But she did look familiar. The boy, though, he didn’t know. He might be from out of town, a far more dangerous category of teenager. A teenager from out of town was capable of anything—even murder.

Page 28 But he circled and ovaled for a minute or so, and though his lines were more tentative and did not have Oana’s flourish and accuracy, in the end he created a general shape not unlike hers. He blinked rapidly at his drawing. It was, already, unlike anything he’d ever done. It was much like hers, and it was like the objects in front of him, and yet it was somehow his.

Page 36 He convulsed, and she massaged his head with her hands, round and round like a planetary storm.

Page 52 Jed had been held back, then kicked out and now attended the Boys Academy, a gloomy campus on the edge of town where the most wayward and unpromising young men went. Jed’s father was a cop.

Page 94 “I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track.

Page 96 He closed his book, reshelved it and left the library through the side door. The door boomed when he opened it and whispered when it closed.

Page 96 Outside, the air was cold and crisp and hit him like love. The ancient trees stood over him, nodding in quiet tribute. When he got back to work, the Whistlestop smelled of cigarette smoke and snow. Jed was sitting at one of the dinettes with a woman of about twenty-two.

Page 135 He drew the log truthfully and stayed until dark. When he was finished he examined his work, feeling like the day could not have been spent in any better way. The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.

Page 157 ...and the surfaces were alive, were untamed and varied and rewarded close inspection.

Page 166 “I recognize that many among you are not draftsmen. You are not interested in rendering the world as you see it. That is fine. The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it. When we hound certain kinds of artists out of this school—hound out the most naturally and classically skilled, lord help us!—we engage in a kind of upside-down artistic fascism that reminds me of Pol Pot purging his country of intellectuals.”

Page 168 “Beauty justifies itself!” Carpenter yelled. “There is a perfectly inverse relationship between talent and the need to explain itself. The artist’s only rational response to ‘Why did you make this?’ is ‘Because I wanted to’ or ‘Because it felt right.’ Everything else is sophistry!”

Page 168 You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers’ success means your failure. It is not. You have been fed the lie that greatness emerges from cruelty. This has never been true and never will be true. These group crits have no purpose and accomplish nothing. They kill the heroes and reward the scavengers. They must end.”

Page 178 As professors, they’re forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which lead to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous.”

Page 189 And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?”

Page 244 The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment. So rarely could he realize the image in his mind, and even if he could, what would he do with it? Show it in an empty gallery next to the work of Peter-James Flemming?

Page 247 Shit, what if that happens to us? Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices. Are they nice to you at least?”

Page 253 “And I haven’t done anything yet. At thirty everyone judges you, right? You need something to have happened before thirty. Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.”

Page 276 When we create well, the world is good, he thought. We’ve wrestled amorphous ideas into knowable shapes, we’ve improved—even glorified—flesh on canvas, we’ve made something greater than ourselves.

Page 343 But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.

Page 360 She was a muscular, angular being—a practical person

Page 369 It was only in seeing friends, also on their joined journey of decline, that he saw aging’s wretched work.

Page 381 God, look at this. What do you think: Is there just enough beauty in the world, or too much? You have only two choices.” “Too much,” he said. “Good answer,” she said, and stood in the water, motionless for a long while.

Page 409 The quiet and sacred world of now that he’d tended had been punctured, and the past was rushing through, filling the room.

Page 413 “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.”

Flesh by David Szalay, r. Feb. 2026

p. 128 "So you need to fit in. You need to fit in with everything else in their lives. That's what they want. They're people with serious money and they want someone who fits in with everything else in their lives."

p. 83 He realizes that the thing that are so important to him – the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again – they just aren't important here. [as he looks out the window of the train, dusk becoming night and thus his own reflection, leaving the war in the Middle East and heading back home]

p. ??? Without that hour in the afternoon to look forward to, there is nothing to give the days any sense of purpose or meaning.

p. 162 There are those London summer days when summer seems muffled somehow, when a cool, humid grayness hangs in the park as he runs. Statues hold their positions.

p. 172 He lies there for another minute or two against the pillows, looking at the ceiling, which is discreetly studded with smoke detectors and other things, and wondering what will happen now.

p. 214 The difference is maybe that when he’s drunk he doesn’t care that he’s disconnected from things, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, whereas when he’s stoned it somehow does.

p. 256 On Christmas Eve he meets some Oxford friends for lunch in London. Afterward they go to a pub in Knightsbridge with an open fire. It’s one of those winter afternoon drinking sessions that merge into evening in a way that’s almost imperceptible as it’s happening. It’s just suddenly nine o’clock.

p. 278 There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these [video calls], the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.

p. 289 The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he’s suffering in some way, and that there’s not much he can do about it is very hard for him to deal with. It’s just very painful to think about.

My Struggle #4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, r. Dec. 2024

Page 19 It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I’d ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge. 

Page 22 What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. 

Page 60 Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position. 

Page 105 Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure. 

Page 157 Over the white timber fence you could see sections of the river, greenish in the bright sunlight, and the roofs of the houses on the other side. There were trees everywhere, these beautiful green creations that you never really paid much attention to, just walked past; you registered them but they made no great impression on you in the way that dogs or cats did, but they were actually, if you lent the matter some thought, present in a far more breathtaking and sweeping way. 

Page 164 Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. 

Page 195 Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. 

Page 208 I told her everything else and she listened, occasionally with a genuinely surprised expression on her face, as though she hadn’t thought about what I was saying. Although she had, of course, it was just that her empathy was so immense that she forgot herself and her own thoughts. Sometimes it was as if we were like minds. Or equals at least. Then something changed and the distance between us became apparent. 

Page 214 The sky above the yellow deciduous trees and the green conifers was dense and gray. The grayness, and the fact that all visibility stopped there, just a few meters above, increased the intensity of the colors; the yellow, the green, and the black were hurled into space, as it were, yet blocked by the gray sky, and that must have been why the colors shone with such abandon. They had the power to lift off and disappear into eternity but couldn’t, and so the energy was burned up where they were. 

Page 231 The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. 

Page 291 “Why didn’t you just leave?” I said. “Leave Dad?” I nodded with my mouth full. “I’ve wondered about that many times myself,” she said. “I don’t know.” We ate for a while without speaking. It was odd to think we had been in Sørbøvåg only this morning. It seemed like much longer. It was a different world. “Well, I don’t have a good answer to that,” she said at length.

Page 295 We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. 

Page 300 Yngve and Kristin had sat down on the sofa. They were looking around the way you do when you are somewhere new, discreetly absorbing their surroundings, constantly aware of each other, not necessarily with their glances but in the total way that lovers can be when everything is about the two of them. Kristin was a miracle of joy and naturalness, and that rubbed off on Yngve, he was fully open to it and wore an almost childish glow that he only had when he was with her. 

Page 343 The other letters were from Hilde and Mom. I didn’t open them until I got home, letters were a party, everything had to be perfect when I read them. Steaming coffee in a cup, music on the stereo, a rollie in my hand, and one ready on the table. I started with the one from Mom. 

Page 360 When darkness fell I let it enter the flat, too, apart from on the desk, where a small lamp shone like an island in the night. There was me and my writing, an island of light in the darkness, that was how I imagined it.

Page 366 The days became shorter, and they became shorter quickly, as though they were racing toward the darkness. The first snow arrived in mid-October, went after a few days, but the next time it fell, at the beginning of November, it came with a vengeance, day after day it tumbled down, and soon everything was packed in thick white cushions of snow, apart from the sea, which with its dark, clean surface and terrible depths lay nearby like an alien and menacing presence, like a murderer who has moved into a neighboring house and whose unheeded knife glints on the kitchen table. 

Page 367 An avalanche blocked the road, a ferry service was started, and the fact that you were only able to leave twice a day increased the feeling that this village was the only village, these people the only people. I was still getting lots of letters, and spent a lot of time answering them, but the life they represented was no longer the one that counted, the one that did was this: up in the morning, out into the snow, up the hill to school, and into class. Stay there all day, in a low-roofed, illuminated bunker, weighted down by the darkness, go home, go shopping, have dinner, and then in the evening train in the gym with the youngest fishermen, watch TV at school, swim in the pool, or sit at home reading or writing until it was so late that I could go to bed and sleep off the dead hours before the next day started. 

Page 383 While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror. 

Page 419 I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with others I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts. 

Page 431 I unpacked my clothes, ate some supper, read in bed for a couple of hours before switching off the light and going to sleep. 

Page 440 Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person becomes attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. 

Page 469 People were so preoccupied with trivialities, they kept searching until they found something and then they went for the jugular instead of keeping sight of the bigger picture, here we all are, humans on one earth, we’re only here for the short term, in the midst of all this wondrous creation, grass and trees, badgers and cats, fish and sea, beneath a star-strewn sky, and you get worked up over a broken guitar string? A snapped drumstick? Some silly bed linen that hasn’t been returned? Come on, what’s the matter with all of you?

Page 473 “Five more minutes,” I said. “Then you have to go back inside.” I walked toward the entrance, heard them laughing behind me, I felt such warmth for them, not only for them though, for all the pupils and all the people in the village, in fact, for everyone in the world. It was that kind of day. 

Page 477 the thought made me desperate in the same senseless way that I was sad whenever anyone left a party, as though with every person who left I came a step closer to death or some other calamity.

Page 489 I had never quite found the right tone with Tor Einar. We were the same age and had a lot in common, much more than I and Nils Erik had, but it didn’t help, it was irrelevant. I always played a role when I was with Tor Einar, which wasn’t the case with Nils Erik, and I didn’t like myself when I did, when there was a distance between the person I was and what I said, a kind of delay that allowed space for calculations, as if I wanted to say what he preferred to hear rather than what I had to say or talk about.

Playground by Richard Powers, r. Oct. 2024

 Location 729 MONTREAL, 1947. LATE NOVEMBER, bleak winter, when every trip outdoors after five p.m. felt like suicide.

Location 1419 Late in the middle of a protracted slugfest one autumn evening at Ignatius, in the papery, chill dark that was five p.m. in a Chicago October, he stopped the chess clock and said, “Hold on. Can I ask you something?”

Location 1445 I GET VERTIGO REMEMBERING everything that happened to us in those years at Ignatius, as adulthood insinuated itself into our adolescent bodies. I see myself standing in front of those twenty-foot tall, massive oak front doors with the embossed lion’s head, hearing the teenage frenzy behind them waiting for me as I pulled them open. We were living that epic work in progress, watching it unfold in front of us, move by adolescent move. The mess of first sex, my timid experiments with pot, the free-for-all of social jockeying, all the changing games of prestige, self-invention, and group loyalty: life would never again be so saturated in possibility. But the teachers who formed me, the girls I thought I loved with such passion, the classmates whose respect I so desperately sought: they’re all like characters in a novel that I can barely remember and have no need to read again.

Location 1459 She plunged into the blue country, gliding through hillocks of staghorn and brain and fan corals while mobbed by snappers and soldierfish, grunts, rays, rock beauties, butterflies and angels, gobies and groupers, sergeant majors, blennies, turtles, triggerfish, sponges, tunicates, nudibranchs, and sea stars, too many to identify.

Location 1493 Her parents couldn’t grasp how the timid kid who chewed her lips and fretted her cardigans to spaghetti had become a felon of self-assertion in a few short years. But to Evie, the metamorphosis felt as simple as breathing. Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed.

Location 1496 She had found the secret of liberty and of life: disguise yourself and do what you need to.

Location 1912 The open sea was a calendar consisting of one blank page—no days or weeks, not even months, really.

Location 1971 Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn’t open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free.

Location 2229 First in, last out, as it generally goes, even for brains that aren’t being eaten away from the inside by runaway proteins. The older the memory, the more textured. I can’t always tell how far away a door is or find my way to it without slamming into things. I’m losing governance over my body’s provinces. But I can remember the taste of ice cream when I was six—the precise flavor of blueberry cheesecake—a taste they don’t make anymore.

Location 2245 Every business beyond a certain size grows its own hive mind. The company itself will find a person who can implement its collective will. And the people at the helm will be convinced of their own agency, just as I was.

Location 2479 We joined up with five other Chess Club nerds to play Diplomacy—John Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, and Henry Kissinger’s favorite game. It unfolded over the course of a marathon ten-hour session one Saturday at the home of one of the club members, a Frank Lloyd Wright creation in Hyde Park. I later hired that guy to work for me as a lawyer for Playground, starting him at two hundred thousand a year, based in part on his conniving in that game.

Location 2516 Rafi was a computer games virgin. Games were coming into the world that had no precedent in human history. Shooters. Point-and-click adventures. Interactive fictions. Unscripted business sims that gave the user real agency. Puzzle pieces raining down from on high. Rafi tried them but didn’t like them. “Whoa. That’s just like beating off. Where’s the love, man? Where’s the other human?”

Location 2521 “You know what we are?” he said, sipping his favorite Life Savers soda. “Condemned to freedom. Sisyphus really is happy, brother. Give or take.”

Location 2538 ‘Time you enjoyed wasting was not wasted.’ John Lennon.”

Location 3293 Neither Rafi nor I saw what was happening. No one did. That computers would take over our lives: Sure. But the way that they would turn us into different beings? The full flavor of our translated hearts and minds? Not even my most enlightened fellow programmers at CRIK foresaw that with any resolution.

Location 3388 Ina slugged her husband in his thin upper arm and petted her son. “Every human heart imagines God in a different way. A way just right for that imaginer.”

Location 4013 The people I worked alongside of at Illinois went on to create Netscape, JavaScript, Oracle, and YouTube. Huge empty continents were thrown open for homesteading. The world slipped from one age into the next.

Location 4273 But my father had told me once that a man’s worth was measured by how much money other people were willing to let him lose.

Location 4470 All Didier ever wanted from his stint in public life was to finish this job without reproach from anyone. He was beginning to understand how impossible that was.

Location 4597 “If two choices are impossible to choose between, it means they have equal merit. Either choice can have your belief. It doesn’t matter which you choose. You shed one chooser and grow into another.”

Location 4993 The need to solve an intricate puzzle and the need to quiet your brain are twin sons of different mothers. I was helping to build the next big way of being.

Location 5199 The editor knew that no one had ever lost a sale by underestimating the desire of the reading public to read at a simpler level.

Location 5643 The mayor shook his head, unable to believe the claim. “This man is a billionaire. He runs one of Earth’s largest companies. Is he really going to pour millions into this plan because . . . ?” He saw the answer to his own objection. The world was full of billionaire boys getting revenge.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, r. Sep. 2022

 p. 8 Irregular hours encouraged him to imagine that he was master of his own time. Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt he was a pin in the hinge of power.

p. 31 But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

p. 241 Quoyle was not going back to New York, either. If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here [in Newfoundland] it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. Thought of his stupid self in Mockingburg, taking whatever came at him. No wonder love had shot im through the heart and lungs, caused internal bleeding.

p. 244 "If you make it to March, boy, you'll make it to heaven. You get on the plane in Misky Bay, there's so much ice on the wings and the wind from hell you doubt the plane can make it, but it does, and when it glides down and lands (in Florida), when they throws open the door, my son, I want to tell you the smell of hot summer and suntan oil and exhaust fumes make you cry with pleasure. A sweet place they got down there with the oranges."

p. 293 "We got no control over any of the fishery now. We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place." A hard exhalation rather than a sigh. But, Quoyle thought, that's how it was everywhere. Jack was lucky he'd escaped so long.

p. 332 Billy Pretty speaking, a glass in his hand. His face gone blood-red with whiskey and the words tumbling out in ecstatic declamation, tossing in the lop of his own talk. "You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her."

Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake, r. Sep. 2016

p. 26 It was not often that Flay approved of happiness in others. He saw in happiness the seeds of independence, and in independence the seeds of revolt. But on an occasion such as this it was different, for the spirit of convention was being rigorously adhered to, and in between his ribs Mr Flay experienced twinges of pleasure.

p. 82 Through the door and into my secret attic. And here it is I am. I am here now. I have been here lots of times but that is in the past. That is over, but now I'm here it's in the present. This is the present. I'm looking on the roofs of the present and I'm leaning on the present window-sill and later on when I'm older I will lean on this window-sill again. Over and over again.

p. 96 When Mrs Slagg reached the cradle she put her fingers to her mouth and peered over it as though into the deepest recesses of an undiscovered world. There he was. The infant Titus. His eyes were open but he was quite still. The puckered-up face of the newly-born child, old as the world, wise as the roots of trees. Sin was there and goodness, love, pity and horror, and even beauty for his eyes were pure violet. Earth's passions, earth's griefs, earth's incongruous, ridiculous humours - dormant, yet visible in the wry pippin of a face.

p. 110 I, as part of my work here, deliver the new generations to the old - the sinless to the sinful, ha, ha, ha, the stainless to the tarnished - oh dear me, the white to the black, the healthy to the diseased. And this ceremony today, my very dear ladyships, is a result of my professional adroitness, ha, ha, ha, on the occasion of a brand new Groan.

p. 163 Steerpike had an unusual gift. It was to understand a subject without appreciating it. He was almost entirely cerebral in his approach. But this could not easily be perceived; so shrewdly, so surely he seemed to enter into the heart of whatever he wished, in his words or deeds, to mimic.

p. 333 For every key position in the Castle there was the apprentice, either the son or the student, bound to secrecy. Centuries of experience had seen to it that there should be no gap in the steady, intricate stream of immemorial behaviour.

p. 412 The autumn and winter winds and the lashing rain storms and the very cold of those seasons, for all their barbarism, were of a spleen that voiced the heart. Their passions were allied to human passions - their cries to human cries. But it was otherwise with this slow pulp of summer, this drag of heat, with the incurious yellow eye within it, floating monotonously, day after day.

p. 422 A closer degree of intimacy had been established in the castle between whatever stood, lay, knelt, was propped, shelved, hidden or exposed, or left ready to use, animate or inanimate, within the castle walls. A kind of unwilling knowledge of the nearness of one thing with another - of one human, to another, though great walls might divide them - of nearness to a clock, or a banister, or a pillar or a book, or a sleeve. For Flay the horrible nearness to himself - to his own shoulder and hand. The out-pouring of a continent of sky had incarcerated and given a weird hyper-reality of closeness to those who were shielded from all but the sound of the storm.

p. 445 ...and lifting his head he noticed how, with a deepening of the rose in the sky, all things were tinted, as though they had awaited the particular concentration of hue which the sky now held, before admitting the opinions of their separate colours to be altered or modified.

p. 455 The sickness was relieved, the sickness and the staleness of the summer day. The scorched leaves pattered one against the next, and the tares screaked thinly together, the tufted heads nodding, and upon the lake was the stippled commotion of a million pin-pricks and the sliding of gooseflesh shadows that released or shrouded momently the dancing of diamonds.

p. 460 The Doctor (for it was Prunesquallor) showed about as much sign of having a pair of hips as an eel set upon its end, while Irma, in white silk, had gone out of her way, it appeared, to exhibit to their worst advantage (her waist being ridiculously tight) a pair of hips capable of balancing upon their osseous shelves enough bric-a-brac to clutter up a kleptomaniac's cupboard.